Word: fossils
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Despite their great age, the stumps, logs and leaves are astonishingly well preserved. "This fossil forest is not petrified, turned to stone by minerals entering and replacing the wood cell structure," says Neil McMillan, of the Geological Survey of Canada, who discovered a similar but much smaller site 30 years ago on nearby Ellesmere Island. Instead, shallow burial in the Arctic soil has left the forest in a mummified state. As a result, says Basinger, "you can saw the wood. You can burn it." Indeed, during an expedition to the site in July, he actually brewed...
...fossil forest should also fuel some important scientific research. "You can see a prehistoric forest in a growth condition: how dense it was, how the trees grew, how productive it was," Basinger says. "It gives us a much better idea of the plants populating the high latitudes (at that time), the kind of environment there, and how they relate to living forms today...
...birds was a pigeon-size creature that looked like a dinosaur with feathers. Now, however, the 150 million-year-old Archaeopteryx has apparently been dethroned by a specimen named Protoavis ("first bird"), which lived 75 million years before Archaeopteryx. Last week's announcement was based on two fragmentary fossil skeletons found in the arid badlands of western Texas in 1984 by Texas Tech University Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee. They suggest that Protoavis was a contemporary of the earliest dinosaurs. "If the identification is correct," says Yale Paleobiologist John Ostrom, who has examined the crow-size remains, "it has to send...
...avian wishbone and cloak of feathers, led many scientists to hail it as a missing link between reptiles and birds. But Protoavis has even more birdlike features than its younger cousin, Chatterjee believes. While both species have wishbones and forelimbs elongated into wings, he points out, the older fossil also has a bird's wide eye sockets, a large braincase and a breastbone designed to anchor muscles used in flight. Tiny bumps along Protoavis' forelimbs could indicate where feathers were attached. Explains Chatterjee: "Because some birds in the Cretaceous period (which began about 130 million years ago) were very modern...
...reluctant to render a final verdict. If additional Protoavis specimens bolster Chatterjee's interpretation, it would indicate that birds appeared and diversified much earlier than scientists had believed. "Paleontology is like dealing with a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for which you only have 15," says Ostrom. "This fossil gives you another 15 or 20 pieces of the puzzle...